THE GREAT COLD The land lay trusting and defenceless under a cynical sky, which was unthreatening but mocking.

Dotting a stretch of country thirty miles on either side of the railway, and extending as far to the east and west along its line, there were scattered hundreds of homes, though often these were separated one from the other by many miles of open prairie.

Fences and fields appeared, and low stacks of hay and straw here and there stood up above the vast gray surface of the old buffalo and cattle range.

Some of these houses were board "shacks," while others were of sods, and yet others, these among the earliest established on the plains, the useful dugout, half above and half beneath the ground.

Yet each building, squat or tall, small or less small, was none the less a home.